Ranting About Reliability: Anybody Seen the Operator?

The ornery old man is loose on the RN blog again: laugh, cry and enjoy

For the love of all things holy, good, and reliable, Operator stay with your machine when you have a break down. A break down is not an invitation to go to the break room. Why you say? Because maintenance technicians are not freaking mind readers. They should not have to guess why the line is down. It's not like that work order with the one line description that reads "formulator broke" cleared up anything. Besides, if you stay with the equipment not only will you be able to pass on what is broken you can also describe what was happening just prior to the failure. This will be incredibly helpful to your troubleshooting teammate. If you are lucky, you might even learn something or even teach something as you and your maintenance partner work together to not only solve the problem but also reduce the chance of re-occurrence. When the work is complete you can start the line together. This will insure the repair was effective and there will not be a delay from completion of the work to production start-up.

And another thing, would you please tell me why operators should be rewarded with a break when we have had a failure. It should be all hands, including operators, on deck working to resolve the issue. We are here to make things not make hours and if anyone is just interested in making hours you may get the rude awakening that comes with off shoring to lower cost countries that don't make hours they take jobs. 

Have a happy Monday ...